Pullbox is a very simple implementation that can serve as an alternative
for Dropbox that is based on Git. It works currently on any Linux-like OS
and OSX but not on Windows.
Dropbox works well enough and works on many platforms. Although your data is
on someone else's server, it is probably safer over there than with you (for
most cases). I wrote Pullbox to overcome a specific limitation in Dropbox
i.e. Symlinks. Dropbox does not "see" symlinks. Although it synchronizes the
content pointed to by the symlink, it forgets that fact that it is a Symlink
when you sync to another computer.
I want to maintain my personal wiki and journal as plain text files. In order to organize my notes structure, I depend on symlinks (so I can put the same note under multiple directories). Dropbox does not support this use-case.
Pullbox needs SSH access to a remote Linux server that has git and
inotifywait commands installed. This serves as the backup location for
your local data.
Pullbox monitors file system activity in the local directory and
automatically pushes changes to the remote repo. The monitoring is done
using inotify on Linux, FSEvents on OSX, kqueue on BSD style OSs.
Pullbox also monitors file system activity on the remote repo and
automatically pulls changes to the local repo when needed. This is achieved
by using ssh and running inotifywait on the server (a lot like AJAX
long-polling except we use SSH here instead of HTTP).
Instructions shown below assume Ubuntu Linux. You can modify based on the
actual distro you have. Let us say the domain name of the backup server is
example.com
sudo apt-get install git inotify-toolssudo pip install git+git://github.com/prashanthellina/pullboxI am assuming that the username on the backup server is prashanth. We need
to setup password-less SSH login to prashanth@example.com (instructions
here)
Pullbox depends on password-less login, so make sure it is working before
proceeding.
Let us assume that your local directory that you want to sync is
/home/prashanth/notes. Make sure that this directory is not present
the very first time you start Pullbox. This allows Pullbox to clone
the remote repo properly. You can run Pullbox manually by running the
following command.
pullbox --log-level DEBUG /home/prashanth/notes prashanth@example.comThat's it! Your directory will now be kept in sync with the remote
server repo as long as the pullbox command above runs. In order to have
the command run all the time (after system reboot and upon accidental
killing etc), put an entry in crontab like so
* * * * * /usr/local/bin/pullbox --log-level DEBUG --log /tmp/pullbox.log --quiet /home/prashanth/notes prashanth@example.com &> /dev/null